Lifesaving for Beginners

the front door before. He’s never said, ‘Will you go with me?’ so I’m not sure what the story is. He kisses me. Twice. Behind the changing rooms at school, where we smoke at lunchtime. A couple of days after our first conversation, which happened to be about the Smiths. He liked that I liked them too. He wasn’t even talking to me. Not really. He was talking to one of his gang. His herd, Minnie calls them. About a bootleg recording of a Smiths gig in the SFX the previous May. I say, ‘I was at that gig.’
    He looks at me, and I know for a fact that, up till now, he was not aware that I was there.
    He says, ‘You?’
    ‘Me and Minnie.’ I don’t tell him that we went with Minnie’s dad, who was given tickets because he happened to be the insurance broker for the SFX at the time. Instead I say, ‘We went backstage. Morrissey signed my ticket.’
    He says, ‘FUCK OFF!’ before he walks over to me and offers me his cigarette. I take a drag, give it back to him.
    I’m in.
    I make him laugh. I can’t remember how but I remember the sharpness of his Adam’s apple, jutting against the pale skin of his throat, as if it might cut through. He says, ‘You’re funny.’ The next thing you know, we’re walking through St Anne’s Park and then he’s got his arm round my shoulder and somehow – I don’t know how – we end up kissing in the Rose Garden. The next day, at school, there’s a new rumour doing the rounds and it’s about me and Elliot Porter. We’re going out.
    No one can believe it. Especially me.
    I doodle his name in the margins of my homework notebook. Surround it with lovehearts and cupid’s arrows and wedding bells and bubbles of champagne spilling from the tops of long, narrow flutes. I write my name too. Underneath. But only in the faintest pencil, which I rub out immediately.
    Mrs Katherine Porter. Ms Kat Kavanagh-Porter.
    Of course, I don’t tell him any of that. I’m in love. But I’m careful. You have to be careful with a boy like Elliot Porter.
    I don’t tell Ed. Ed is not good at keeping secrets. ‘Kat’s in love,’ he would have told my father. ‘But she made me promise not to tell anyone so don’t tell anyone, OK?’
    Instead, when Ed asks what’s wrong with me, I shake my head and say, ‘Nothing,’ and he asks me to play Snakes and Ladders and I let him win and then Mrs Higginbotham makes us mugs of chicken soup and we watch Gidget on the telly – with the sound down low if Mum is working in the attic – and I stir the soup round and round with a spoon and think about Elliot Porter.
    Elliot Porter is not an easy boy to be in love with. He is moody. Unpredictable. He mitches off school. He smokes cigarettes lifted from packets of blue Rothmans his father leaves lying around. He fills SodaStream bottles with mixtures of brandy and gin and vodka and whiskey, filched from the drinks cabinet in his parents’ front room. He washes it down with cans of Coke, in the fields behind his house. He steals things from shops. Things he doesn’t need and will never use. He has long black hair and wild navy eyes that never settle on any one thing for long.
    And then there’s the sex. Elliot Porter is keen to have sex. He’s done it before. Loads of times, I’d say. He assumes I have done it too. I don’t tell him the truth. I think he won’t be interested in me if he realises the extent of my experience, which is Bressy Dolan putting his hand up my T-shirt and – fleetingly – cupping one breast through my bra last summer.
    The sex turns out to be brief and messy. The first time, in his house, when his mother goes to the tennis club. Her white tennis skirt strains against her waist. She says, ‘You two behave yourselves, OK?’ She winks at us. Blows Elliot a kiss. His father is away again. Malta, I think. Or Tunisia, maybe. A business trip. There are no brothers or sisters to worry about. We do it in the room they call the sunroom, which is a small room at the back of the house. He lowers the blinds. Turns off the telly. Pulls me by the hand onto the couch. We are still in our school uniforms when it’s finished. I pull my skirt down, say I have to go to the bathroom. Wipe at the cold white dribbles running down my legs with a piece of toilet paper.
    The second time is a few days later in my house, during the fifteen minutes between Mrs Higginbotham leaving the house and my father arriving home from the lab. Elliot sends Ed to his room. Tells him he’s hidden a